The Woman from Bratislava

by Leif Davidsen

  I must have become lost in my own thoughts, she seemed to be repeating a question:

  ‘Could I have a glass of water?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said, as if I were a bad host neglecting an invited guest. And not some strange woman who had knocked on my door in the middle of the night in Bratislava. ‘Can I offer you something else, perhaps? From the minibar? A glass of wine?’

  ‘Wine would be lovely,’ she said.

  There was a small bottle of red wine of dubious quality in the minibar. It was also very cold. Nonetheless, I poured two glasses for us and set them down on the ugly, little modern tile-topped table between the two armchairs. I was no longer feeling the effects of the alcohol I had consumed earlier in the evening. I was tired, but my head was clear. I think that already at that point I had subconsciously accepted her story as being true, even though my analytical super-ego still regarded the whole thing as absolute rubbish, a pack of lies.

  I offered my cigarettes to her and she took one.

  ‘I’ve actually given these up,’ she said.

  ‘Haven’t we all?’ I said, giving her a light before firing up my own. I picked up my glass of red wine, raised it wryly to her.

  ‘What should we drink to, madame?’ I said. ‘To death?’

  She winced, but her eyes remained empty of expression. They were remarkable eyes: green as a sunlit lake. But it was the glacial green of a mountain tarn.

  ‘I was actually very fond of him,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry, that was too flippant,’ I said. ‘To life, then? Or to the past?’

  ‘To the past, may our lives not be ruined by it.’

  So we drank to that and gently set down our glasses.

  ‘Might I hear the whole story from the very beginning,’ I asked in my best university lecturer tones.

  So she told me. Presenting the facts as dispassionately as if she were delivering a lecture herself, or making a statement to the police. Even so, it took quite a while. At my age one is past the stage of breaking in with a ‘Really!’ or ‘You don’t say!’ every time something surprises you, and her story did surprise me. It did not really upset me, though. As I say: I never knew my real father. If she had been talking about my step-father, Poul, it might have been a different matter, and the story might have caused me greater mental and emotional upheaval than it did at that moment.

  ‘My father came to Croatia at the beginning of September 1943. He was just a sergeant with the Danish Regiment. His company made camp at the village of Sisak, fifty kilometres outside of Zagreb. My mother told me that the Danish soldiers’ nerves were in a bad state, they were thin and exhausted. They drank too much of the excellent Croatian brandy. As if the alcohol could chase away their memories. The Danish Regiment had been formed in part by soldiers from the Danish Legion, which had been disbanded by the SS along with the other foreign legions. The men were angry about this, but that was not what drove them to drink. No, it was the memory of the bitter fighting in Russia, at a place they called the Demjan Cauldron. It was the memory of returning home on leave to a Denmark where they were not welcomed as heroes, but spat on and denounced as traitors. My mother was twenty and worked as a secretary at the local town hall. Croatia was a free country, though possibly fascist. Or so it was said after the war. The country was not occupied, but cooperated with Germany in order to remain a sovereign nation. We called our army the Ustashi. They fought against Tito’s partisans, who were all over the place. The Danish Regiment was actually only meant to be in Croatia for a few months for training, along with the other units from the Nordland Division, but they were immediately dispatched to fight the partisans. It was a terrible conflict, with no mercy shown on either side. Partisans hung from every lamp post. German soldiers who were taken prisoner were killed and castrated. None of this did my father’s bad nerves any good. Only one thing kept the soldiers going: there was plenty of food in Croatia – the Good Lord has blessed us in this respect. They loved the Croatian fruit and vegetables. And they loved the dancing in the square at Sisak on a Saturday night. This was sometimes possible, despite the war. The soldiers danced with the local girls on the warm summer evenings and that was how my father met my mother. At a dance in the soft darkness of a Croatian night in the middle of the war. One tends to forget that pleasures are most intense when the horrors of war are at their height. When were Sarajevo’s women loveliest? When was their make-up most immaculate? When were their dresses at their most elegant? During the worst bombing raids. Mankind’s gift for survival never ceases to astonish me. It’s such a banal story really. At a time when death and rape were as certain as the fact that the sun rises in the east, they fell in love. Throughout their lives they would tell us children how blissfully in love they had been, despite the sounds of gunfire in the night. Despite the indescribable horrors they experienced and the blood there must have been on my father’s hands. I have a picture of them. They look so happy. My father was a fine figure of a man. My mother was a beautiful young woman. The Danish Regiment was transferred to the Russian front in the November. By then I was the tiny, growing fruit of their love.’

  I sat there, rapt and expectant. I had a number of questions I would have liked to ask, but I was so intrigued by her account, although it was, in fact, a fairly common wartime story. There must be thousands with similar tales to tell. It had all happened so many years ago that it hardly seemed to have anything to do with me personally. She asked for another cigarette, took a gulp of her wine and continued in the same soft voice. She had a habit of tugging her right ear lobe, usually when she came to a part of her story which seemed to affect her. Otherwise she appeared to have full control over her emotions and the narrative devices she was employing.

  ‘The outcome of the war was, of course, a foregone conclusion. Germany lost. Tito won, and Croatia was incorporated into Socialist Yugoslavia. Some said that Tito the Croat had betrayed his own country. But maybe it was the best thing that could have happened. For a few years at least. Although it was no fun being on the losing side. My mother had not been directly associated with the Ustashi, but still. She had been a secretary for the system and she had gone out with a soldier in the Waffen SS. She was interned for a while, but even though brutality is an inescapable part of life in the Balkans, she was not abused. Maybe the guards’ hearts were softened by the tiny infant at her breast. Me. What do I know? Maybe she never told me the truth. She had received no word of my father. He had written several letters to her from the Eastern front. Tender letters, but also missives from which even the censors could not delete the hopelessness and the knowledge that the war was lost. My mother accepted the protection, as it was called, of one of the new socialist officials who had taken over. She got a new job. He got her body. For a couple of years it was a good deal. I do not remember him. He may have been purged, while my mother was cleared. Or forgotten. The new job was very much like the old one, only the masters were different. I have no memory of that time, I was too young, but after 1949, when Tito broke with Moscow, it was possible to be both a socialist and a nationalist. Croats, Serbs and Bosnians had to form a concerted front against Stalin’s plans for invasion. In the Balkans the past is never forgotten. History lives on in every single person. But there are times when they are very good at suppressing it. And you might think that it does not matter, but it always matters. In 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, my father turned up. Suddenly one day there he was. We were living on the outskirts of Zagreb, down near the river. It was a beautiful sunny day and the air smelled of summer as it only can in Croatia. A tall, powerfully built man with a broad grin. My mother looked as if she had seen a ghost. I can’t have been more than seven. But I remember it as if it was yesterday. He picked me up and hugged me. My lovely little daughter, he said in German. My mother told me later that that was what he had said. I felt so incredibly comfortable with him. Not for one second did I doubt that he was my father. Being fatherless was a fate I had shared with millions of children i
n the post-war world. But I think every one of those children dreamt that one day their father would come back from the war and take them in his arms. My mother burst into tears. She came over to us, he put me down gently and wrapped his arms around us both. That is the first time in my childhood that I can remember being absolutely happy. My father had come home.’

  She stopped, drank the last of her wine, and I squeezed a few more drops out of the little bottle for her.

  ‘And?’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘After that came everyday life, the sort of life that’s so hard to describe simply because it’s so ordinary.’

  I stared at her. Here was this half-sister, suddenly showing up out of the past; to some extent we were related by blood. That in itself was a strange thought, but I was having trouble digesting her story. Possibly because I found it hard to comprehend. Or possibly because it simply had not sunk in. I said:

  ‘Tell me a little bit about that everyday life. What did he do for a living, for example?’

  ‘Baked bread, naturally. He was a baker, after all, and a baker he remained until he retired. He was a good baker.’

  ‘How come he was allowed to stay in the country? I mean, he was a former Nazi. And an SS soldier. At Nuremberg men like him were condemned as war criminals, for God’s sake.’

  ‘There were several reasons,’ she said. ‘In Croatia, even under Tito, not everyone regarded the Germans and the Ustashi as fascists. To many people they were patriots, fighting for a free Croatia. For the Croatian nation and its culture. It was not as simple as the propaganda made it out to be. Some were punished, of course. Others took over the reins of government, but in some part of them they were always Croatians first and socialists second. Look at our President, Franco Tudjman. Wasn’t he a socialist once? And didn’t he shape the new, independent Croatia fifty years later? Who can say what he was thinking in his heart of hearts, all those years when he served socialism and Yugoslavia. And anyway, my father had taken a different name. Later he became a Croatian, or rather, Yugoslavian, citizen. Learned our language. Became one of us.’

  ‘But how was he able to do all that?’

  She considered me for some moments with those strangely blank, glacial eyes before replying:

  ‘He never said. His old comrades fixed things for him, that was all he would tell us. After the war they helped one another. The losers helped each other to make new lives for themselves.’

  The old SS network, about which so much had been written, I thought. That mysterious brotherhood of old Nazis and war veterans which had discreetly organised visas, jobs, houses. I had never really believed in it. It sounded a bit too far-fetched: the idea that the losing side should be in a position to pull strings in the ruins of post-war Europe. And once the economic boom of the sixties came along no one gave any more thought to a bygone war, apart perhaps from some old freedom-fighters or nostalgic SS veterans.

  But you never could tell.

  Maybe that was how my real father had come by his first bakery in Denmark. I had sometimes wondered how he and my mother had found the wherewithal to set it up. My mother said they had borrowed the money. That was why they had gone bankrupt so quickly. They had had nothing to fall back on. But strictly speaking it could also have been funded by profiteering money. There were a lot of shady goings-on just after the war ended. To put it mildly. And there was a good deal of unaccounted-for cash in circulation. Those five years were not the most illustrious in Danish history. Nor, indeed, was the period that followed them.

  ‘Do I have any other brothers or sisters?’ I asked.

  ‘You did have,’ she said, and her eyes darkened slightly. ‘My father and mother had twins. Two boys. They were born in 1956. They died in 1995. Within two days of one another, at Krajna when the Croatian army drove out the Serbs.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said and meant it.

  ‘The Balkans is a sorry place,’ was all she said, and we fell silent once more. All was quiet in the hotel. We heard the drone of a solitary car on the street outside and a plaintive cry that ceased as abruptly as it had begun. As if some desperate individual had given momentary vent to their pain by screaming out loud.

  ‘Do you have children?’ I said.

  ‘I have two girls, I’m glad to say. They were spared having to fight. I have two grandchildren. Both strong and healthy. Compared to a lot of others I got off lightly. One of my sons-in-law will have to spend the rest of his days with only one leg, but that you can live with. The Serbian mine left his manhood unscathed. One of my daughters is expecting another baby. So the past ten years of war in my country have not been too hard on me. But it is a war that is still going on. In Kosovo now. And now your country, my father’s native land is at war with Yugoslavia.’

  ‘With Serbia,’ I corrected her. ‘I thought you were a Croat.’

  A flicker of uncertainty passed over her face, as if she had somehow given herself away.

  ‘I grew up in Yugoslavia,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m glad we’re independent, but I worked for many years in Belgrade and I have a lot of Serbian friends and colleagues. I find it hard to get used to the idea that we are now enemies.’

  ‘What did you do there?’

  ‘Moved papers around in one of the ministries,’ she said. ‘Now I move papers around in another ministry.’

  ‘Why are you telling me all this,’ I asked, and was surprised by the vehemence with which it came out.

  ‘It was my father’s last wish. Most of this story is new to me too. My parents’ wartime romance has always been a part of the nice myth of my family, but I did not hear the rest of the story, about the other family in Denmark, until very recently. It was our father’s last wish. And I believe that one ought to honour a dying man’s last wish.’

  ‘One doesn’t have to know every damn thing,’ I said. ‘Why the hell does everybody have to go confessing their sins. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.’

  ‘I understand this must be hard for you.’

  ‘I don’t think you understand a blind thing,’ I said. I, for one, did not understand any of it. What, I wondered, was I supposed to tell Fritz and Irma, never mind my elderly mother, who was probably too senile to grasp the fact that her runaway husband had not died in a bar in Hamburg in 1952, but had led a productive and seemingly happy and respectable, if bigamous, life in Croatia. That this whole story, in all its glaring banality, came down to love. That my father had fallen in love with and had an affair with a young woman in a village in Yugoslavia. And that his love had been so strong that it had conquered all. That for decades he had lived happily with the same woman. On some level every modern individual aspired to that same commonplace, conventional ideal of happiness. Or hoped, at least, to find their perfect mate. They never did, though. I spoke from some experience, with three marriages under my belt. In the dead of night, when we are alone, we all dream of unconditional love. We don’t ever expect to achieve it, but we dream about it. This is what we are seeking every time we look into another person’s eyes. In the cold light of day we recognise the futility of the dream; when night comes we dream again.

  I was very tired by now, and both my tooth and my head were aching. I could not take any more. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to go to Budapest the next day, ponder this story and try to figure out what it meant. Because that was my intellectual forte, I told myself: I was bloody brilliant when it came to thinking things through. I could analyse anything, from emotions to international politics, but just at that moment, in the middle of the night in that hotel room, my head was in a whirl.

  ‘I’d like you to leave now,’ I said.

  She looked a little hurt, but her eyes still had that blank look to them which made it hard for me to gauge her actual frame of mind.

  ‘I would like to show you some more pictures. And some letters which my father wrote, but never sent. He felt very bad about leaving his family in Denma
rk. Especially his little boy.’

  ‘My father’s name was Poul. He was a schoolteacher and he loved me as if I was his own son. He adopted me. To me, this ghost from the past that you’ve called up is not my father. He may have endowed me with a glob of genes, but feelings don’t come with the sperm. They are born out of the life we share with others. And now I’d like to be alone, please.’

  I was actually quite surprised to be able to express myself so clearly, bearing in mind the hour and the state I was in, but she was not impressed.

  ‘He wanted your forgiveness,’ she said.

  ‘What about my brother and sister?’

  Without a word she removed another photograph from the manila envelope. It was an ordinary, amateur colour snap, but the image was sharp enough. It showed a group of people at a funeral. They were standing with their heads bared in bright spring sunshine, watching as a simple pine coffin was lowered into the darkness of the grave. This picture shocked me more than everything she had told me up to this point. Because in this group of people, which looked, in all other respects, exactly like any funeral party in the Balkans, I saw my sister Irma. She stood with her head bowed alongside four elderly men. The photo had been taken from so far away that I could not make out the facial features of the mourners, but I was sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it was Irma. It was something to do with the way she held herself, the rather boyish haircut and the pointed nose.